[Sigia-l] Yahoo's Pattern Design Library

[Louise Hewitt]

On 2/15/06, Christopher Fahey <chris.fahey at behaviordesign.com> wrote:
>
> But now Yahoo has gone ahead and released the darn thing publicly:
> http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/index.php
>

Yeah, I was looking at this the other day.

V. welcome as an educating 'authority' to raise the baseline of web standards.

>  It's basically a library of "best practices" for
> common IA problem solving.

Exactly. Not for us pioneers, of course. We all know how the list
members feel about best practices :-) But as we do live in a world
where most web interfaces are designed by non-IA educated groups or
individuals, a highly recognisable and respected public resource like
this should really help people who keep trying to make this stuff up
from scratch. Let's publicise it!

>
> This is not to suggest that Yahoo's patterns are the ONLY way to solve these
> everyday design problems. But Yahoo's implementations of these widgets are
> largely elegant, simple, flexible across massively diverse products and
> services, and of course rigorously tested with hundreds of millions of real
> users.
>

And that's why getting standards like these out there to be used as a
basic solution will improve a big number of web-based experiences for
users. It doesn't preclude innovation, improvement and the such - just
stops us from having to solve the same old problems over and over when
we could be doing something more interesting, like inventing new
deliverables ;-) Hey, I'm getting into these emoticons, maybe we could
categorise them with our new found freetime?

Lou Hewitt (who is not the Director of IIT in Illinois, but a lowly
contract IA in Brighton, UK).